urselves. {29} I never think it is profitable to study oneself too
closely. I never could meditate with any profit on my sins. But
there, I dare say I differ from many others.'

To very intimate friends he would in rare instances admit that the
secret of any influence which he possessed over men was the outcome of
his efforts to pray for them. One who had known him intimately at
Christ's writes in 1904:

'About eighteen months ago I had the privilege of spending a night with
him, and then for the first time I realised how much of his spiritual
power was the outcome of prayer. He told me that in his younger days
he had taken every opportunity of personally appealing to men to come
to Christ. "But," he went on, "as I grow older I become more
diffident, and now often, when I desire to see the Truth come home to
any man, I say to myself, 'If I have him here he will spend half an
hour with me. Instead, I will spend that half-hour in prayer for
him.'" Later on, when I had retired for the night, he came to me again
and said, "W----, what I have said to you is in the strictest
confidence: don't mention it to any one." And this revelation of his
inner life is my last memory of him.'

On another occasion he said to one with whom he was staying, when
speaking of the little that men could do for each other, 'I think that
I should go mad were it not for prayer.'

As an instance of his common sense in a matter in which as a bachelor
he could have had no personal experience, he strongly urged a married
man, before {30} deciding to accept a curacy which had been offered to
him, to let his wife see the vicar's wife or women-folk. 'She will
know intuitively,' he said, 'whether she can get on with them and they
with her, and it will make all the difference to your work and
happiness.' The man to whom this advice was offered writes: 'The
advice was given seriously, but with that bright twinkle of his; and I
owe much to it, for we have been here since . . . and I don't want to
go.'

The following is an extract from a notice which appeared in the
'Guardian '!

'By his published work he is best known to the outer world as one of
the few English scholars who have given attention to Coptic. In 1896
he edited "The Coptic Apocryphal Gospels" in the "Cambridge Texts and
Studies." The important article on the Coptic Version in Hastings's
"Bible Dictionary" came also from his pen, and he was engaged on an
edition of the Sahidi